Overview

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Challenges/Goals

Shoff Darby had several end-of-life servers and a need to ensure that their critical
business applications remained in production during any considered update to their
infrastructure. Due to document imaging using PDF’s, which increased the amount
of data being stored, storage capacity of the existing infrastructure was limited
necessitating an increase in their capacity with room for future growth. Due to
the nature and importance of the data stored in structured and unstructured locations,
simplifying and improving backup and recovery methods was critical to any solution.
Another serious consideration was the limited cooling available in the server room,
so any considered solution would have to factor in this constraint.

Replace several aging servers and reduce heat footprint

Increase storage capacity and accommodate for forecast growth

Minimize downtime and impact any project may have on production

Solution/Approach

After working with the management at Shoff Darby to discuss the infrastructure,
expectations, and analyzing historical storage utilization to prepare an accurate
forecast of storage requirements, Synergy engineers determined a single physical
server with significant storage would meet the requirements. The computing power
of current servers enabled Synergy to virtualize all of Shoff Darby’s physical servers,
which not only reduced heat output, but also reduced electrical consumption. With
the installation of Windows Server 2008 R2 and configuration of the Microsoft Hyper-V
role, we were also able to leverage built-in Windows 2008 Backup to eliminate the
need to maintain expensive third-party backup solutions, tape drives, and tape media.
Our engineers virtualized the physical servers, and due to the power of the host
server, we were able to implement more processor and memory resources to the newly
virtualized servers.

Purchase a new high power and large storage capacity server

Implement Windows Server and Hyper-V role and configure backups

Perform P2V conversions of aging servers and optimize performance

Results

Shoff Darby’s 5 end-of-life servers were virtualized successfully, and the process
was completed with almost no impact to the business as the virtualization was performed
out of business hours. All client workstations and end-users were not impacted by
the project as no reconfigurations were required on domain workstations. Due to
the low cost of high capacity drives, we were able to increase available storage
capacity by orders of magnitude, and have afforded growth well into the future.
The need to reduce heat in the server room was realized by reducing the number of
servers, ensuring no cost to upgrade the cooling in the room by efficiently reducing
heat output of the infrastructure. The legacy backup solution with an expensive
console and backup agents for e-mail, SQL, and Windows was retired, leveraging the
powerful out-of-the-box Windows 2008 Backup solution using inexpensive removable
hard drives. The process to restore data in part or in its entirety was greatly
simplified, and the recovery timeframe reduced significantly.

Replaced all end-of-life servers with a single powerful server with minimal downtime